For Sónia Lavadinho, an urban anthropologist, the city should be a space for encounters and relationships - and this transformation should start right outside the car. In this interview, we talk about relational cities, the potential of intersections, the importance of the nature of proximity, and how we can transform urban spaces so that they no longer serve only a circulatory function.
She was born in Portugal, but you don't often find her here. Sónia Lavadinho began her academic and professional career in anthropology, a field she continues to love in her work as a mobility and urban planning specialist in Switzerland, where she settled as a young woman. He proposes more relational cities, with space and time for meetings and community life, and says that this work should start at intersections because that's where people slow down - even those in cars.
Founder of the consultancy Bfluid and author of books and lectures, Sónia Lavadinho attended the October 2024 international conference Walk’21, The event, dedicated to pedestrian mobility, took place at ISCTE in Lisbon. It was during this meeting that we sat down to talk about relational cities and how we can change public spaces so that they are not exclusively geared towards the circulatory function. We also talked about streets as “rivers of freshness”, where we can be close to nature, and about the the importance of urban transformation starting with motorists, giving them comfort immediately when they get out of the car.
An inspiring talk, which you can read below.
In his talk, he talked about the ideas of fixed or static spaces, relational spaces, where people can establish relationships, living together, etc., and circulatory spaces. For those who missed it, what are these spaces?
I think there are three types of spaces in a city. There are the circulatory spaces, where people are in transit, where they pass through. There are the fixed or static spaces, which are more spaces for contemplation, possibly with a bench or something. And then there are the relational spaces. These spaces are the most difficult to determine, but they are where people enter into relationships. It could be, for example, when one person is sitting and another is standing and talking. This space that is created between them is a relational space. Or it could be the space where people are when, I don't know, they leave a theater or a concert and stand at the door talking. Basically, if we are facing each other in some way, it creates relational spaces. In the past, there were also these spaces at the foot of churches, for example.
What interests me is multiplying these relational spaces in the city, in other words, making more of them available. People in these spaces are more receptive to what other people are doing around them. You can see that there's a lot more conversation, that people look at each other more, that they're interacting more...
Do you think that the political class doesn't value public space as a place for socializing and community life, but only as a space for circulation? And that's why they tend to see the more social use of the street - with people socializing, making noise - as a problem?
Yes, the question is how you give space to the relational function and manage the balances and interests with the other functions. And politics often has a hard time recognizing this more relational dimension of public space. To create a relational space, you just have to create the conditions. It's like a painting that people paint. People are the ones who are going to paint the relational landscape. And all you have to do is provide the framework, the limits, for the person to express themselves. And it's in this freedom of creation that relationships will happen.
In urban planning, it's often difficult to draw something that doesn't exist yet, which is a blank page. Only then will people take ownership of the space and bring it to life. But it's also true that if you don't provide the framework, there's no space for people to express themselves. What interests me is being able to make the street a relational space. It can't just be limited to two or three main squares. It has to be something that expands on the city's DNA, so it has to enter the streets, the intersections... the most banal square meters - let's put it that way.
“Politics often has difficulty recognizing this more relational dimension of public space.”
How can we do that?
What counts to make a relational city is the presence of people - it's the most important ingredient. And people's presence has to be outside, in the public space. It can't be inside an office or a house. The city inside doesn't serve us, what serves us is the city outside.
For this outdoor city, The big question is how to enhance this human presence in the public space, so that the public space can simply be a showcase for the relationships between us. And this question implies that you have to create a kind of public space, which doesn't exist much at the moment, which is a public space that welcomes what I've called ‘micro-permanence’, because in reality, what we do well are squares and parks where people will stay for an hour, two, three or a whole afternoon - that's how we do it well. But these spaces require people to be willing to go there, stay there and come back; and all of this requires time in our schedules, which we generally don't have.
What we always have in our diaries is five, 10, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour... Up to half an hour, people have lots of ‘time tickets’, as I call them. Our wallets are full of these little tickets. They're not full of two-hour, three-hour tickets... to give to the city and cheer it up. In a way, that's what we all do when we choose to sit on a terrace or play with our children in the street. These are all choices that each person makes that collectively will enliven the city, will bring it to life. It's the presence of people.
So the question for me is: how are we going to create these places that I call ‘honeyed places’, these are honeyed places that make you want to stay for five, 10, 15 minutes?. The great secret of the way we could create this relational city is to really multiply, these places in which we can stay from a quarter of an hour to half an hour.
These encounters and relationships can happen at the crossroads between streets, as he told us in the lecture, can't they?
Crossroads are great places to do this. They're places where you don't necessarily go to spend a whole afternoon, but just spend two minutes crossing. The idea is that you feel comfortable at the crossroads and want to stay for a while. Barcelona has started to do this with the intersections, they have created much more convivial places, where people from the neighborhood, and also people who are passing by, will spend those 5, 10, 15 minutes. They drink coffee, talk for a while, play a little game with the children, or have a chat with the older people walking their dogs and then go about their business.
The idea is not to stay there forever, but to have many more spaces and we've realized in our research that people, if they have good networked public spaces, will use up to four, five, six public spaces in the same day. In the morning they'll use one, then they'll use another for the midday break, in the afternoon they'll use another when they pick up the kids, in the evening they'll use another before dinner or when they go to the supermarket... So it ends up being a practice of public spaces in constellation.
You're not just going to one public space to stay there for a long time, you're sharing your time with the city in many different public spaces. And that livens up the city much more. We can't have, as we do today, only 5%, 10%, 15% of our public spaces that are truly relational, and the rest, the vast majority of our public spaces - more than 80%, often 90% - being solely functional spaces, solely made for the circulation function, which takes precedence over all other functions.
“What we always have on our agenda is five, 10, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour... Up to half an hour, people have lots of ‘time tickets’ (...) to offer the city and cheer it up.”
You also said in your lecture that if you were a politician and had budget constraints, you'd only do the intersections and then we'd see about the streets. Why are intersections so interesting to you?
For two reasons. It's the place where flows will naturally converge, people converge there. So they're already there. There are more people there - it's like the mouth of a river that has several tributaries. The streets are tributaries and finally reach that mouth. There is the mouth of pedestrians coming from various places. The intersections are places that are already boiling with diversity, simply because people come from many different streets and places. I also find intersections interesting because that's where people hesitate a little. It's a place where you're naturally going to slow down, because you're trying to decide whether to turn left or right, whether to continue or not.... So we can give the person more reason to stop there.
We have to think about how we're going to make connections between neighborhood centers and how, above all, we're going to work on the borders between neighborhoods. These are often the most neglected places and, precisely because they don't get as much attention, they are spaces with many options, with a lot of potential. For me, it's much more interesting to work on an intersection that connects four neighborhoods. How can this intersection benefit the people of the four neighborhoods? That's very different from working in the center of a neighborhood, where everything that is enhanced will be for the people in that neighborhood. So, if I were a politician, I would work much more on the borders between neighborhoods, because that's where the wealth of the city lies.
Instead of creating rivers for cars and bicycles to flow through, streets where nature can also flow through: water, trees, birds. What is this concept?
Throughout the 20th century, and even now at the beginning of this century, it is the circulatory function that takes precedence. We gave a lot of space to cars, but today we also continue with this paradigm of the circulatory function. It's true that we're also giving pedestrians more space to walk and even sit (there are more benches...) and we're also giving bicycles more space. But all of this continues to be seen through the prism of the circulatory function, first and foremost. So that's where the sharing of space is going - between vehicles. And what I'd like to see more of in cities is a sharing of spaces that is for the relationship with proximity nature, which is very different from big nature. Close nature is nature that you can touch, that you can get close to every day, in a close relationship. The idea is that wherever you are in the city you can find this nature of proximity, but it's also about giving yourself more space to live with others, so that you can strengthen this relationship with others and also the relationship with yourself.
And this has to do with giving space to the relationship with our body in movement. It's not just about being able to sit, it's also about being able to move, to walk, to lie down, to jump, to make various movements with our bodies. This is very important for children, but I'd say it's also very important for adults - to have more spontaneous physical activity, more freedom in terms of posture. And one of the things we really want to create with these relational spaces is spaces in which people are there in every possible way, even lying down, running, jumping, moving, and all of this requires more space, more square meters, doesn't it?
“The nature of proximity is a nature that you can touch, that you can get close to every day, in a relationship of proximity.”
In what way?
Being there together - that expression we use a lot - is not the same thing as being alone. And that's what Jan Gehl said in his books: that of course when you have space that's really pleasant, people optionally go there with more people they know, like friends, family, work colleagues, and then that really requires more space. If you cross a family of four and you're already a couple or you're with three or four work colleagues, then we're already talking about 8 square meters - each person occupies more or less 1 square meter. That's not the same as two people crossing paths on their own. So, for me, that's also the big question: is it to boost the togethering, We need to create spaces where we can be together in interaction. These relational spaces, by definition, are larger because there is the space that our bodies occupy, and then there is the space of the relationship, because it also occupies space.
We have to choose our network geometry very carefully; today, each city has, I don't know, three to six thousand kilometers, depending on the size of the cities. There are plenty of kilometers. That's not what we need. What we lack is a better hierarchy of the network to try to say: of all those kilometers, which ones are really indispensable to the circulation function? And from there you can decide that there are some kilometers of the city that we can allocate to other functions, to the relational function, for example. For example, in Buenos Aires we've removed 8% from the network. It's nothing, you can live without it. But these 8% have been leveraged to connect the parks to the major train stations, of which there are five in Buenos Aires, creating green corridors in the logic of what we were talking about with the ‘rivers of freshness’. But the interesting thing is not so much creating the corridor, but these constellations of spaces and doing it in such a way that later, in the mental chart, the person can remember that this park is connected to that other park, or is connected to that square, or is connected to this station or intermodal hub.
And then this constellation starts to become interesting: you start to make your time available to invest in these spaces. But it's the connecting spaces that are most interesting to me. These spaces always depend on the type of street - there are streets that are avenues, that are wide and that allow you to invest by changing the nature of the street; and there are other streets that are narrower, where you can't cut it into pieces so that everyone can get in, but where you can take that street out of the network and make it entirely relational. A bit like what you've done here in Lisbon with Rua Cor-de-Rosa or the “blue street” [Rua dos Bacalhoeiros] - the problem is that when a city has too few relational places, they become too crowded, and that can sometimes be unpleasant. For me, these relational places or streets should be as abundant as normal streets. No politician, technician or urban design professional is surprised by the fact that we have three thousand kilometers of streets... That doesn't cause anyone a problem. Nobody thinks we have too many streets... In a way, I think we do. Why are we in this... I would even say, relational shortage, in the sense that we only have two or three pink streets, when we could have 100, 200, 300?
“No politician, technician or urban design professional is surprised by the fact that we have three thousand kilometers of streets... That doesn't cause anyone a problem. Nobody thinks we have too many streets... In a way, I think we do.”
Relational streets are good for children, as I was saying earlier... Children are put inside fences, protected from the rest of the city. And when they walk in the streets, the fathers and mothers hold them to protect them from the cars. But Sonia talks about putting children close to cars. Why is this proximity important?
The way a street is designed must clearly indicate the rituals we perform on that street. Is it for driving or is it for playing? And that part has to be clear symbolically, in other words, it's the symbolic part that has to be worked on. People get scared with their children, that's very true. They also get scared because of the speeds. One of the principles of the relational city is that you will walk at a reduced speed... voluntarily - and that's what I think is important. It's the design of the street that will define it. Often because of the complexity, because there's so much for drivers to take in, they slow down. You don't need a billboard to tell you. Lots of people on the street make the car slow down.
But the bigger question is that it's really complicated in these residential streets that we're talking about, and that's why I'm not necessarily in favor of making a play street out of a residential street with a low density of children and also a low density of cars, because then encounters become rare and then people are surprised. What I recommend most is that you use the places of convergence. There's already a shop, there's already a supermarket, there's already a post office, there's already a place to play. And then there are enough people so that the nature of that place is relational all the time. I think it's easier when you have a certain critical mass of people. It may not even be that many, we're talking about maybe 20 people there at a time or 10 people at a time.
But from the moment - and I wanted to emphasize this - that there are two or three people sitting there talking, that corner already becomes relational. It doesn't have to be 300 people, or 3,000. This is also important to understand that it doesn't have to be a lot of people, but what is needed is for these people to be in a relational attitude, to be calm, to take their time. That's also the message, and I think that when motorists enter a relational space like this, they themselves will want to slow down and see what's going on around them; and say: ‘It's so nice here, I'm going to stop, I want to park, where's the next parking lot?. That's the attitude, it's not an attitude of: ‘let me run through here’. No, the attitude is to slow down.
In his speech, he often says that you have to please motorists. Start with them, convince them first....
Yes, it's very important. Because when you have modal splits, like in Lisbon, of 66%... I mean, two out of three people are car drivers; you can't be working only for the minority. You have to work for the majority and if the majority are motorists.... Then, in my opinion, you have to go and touch motorists where they are, i.e. in the car. But it's also clear that you can't go and hit drivers when they're doing 50 or 80 or something an hour. That's not when the person wants to... Even if they wanted to stop or just to brake, they'd stop, I don't know, 300 meters ahead or a kilometer ahead. It has to be when the person is already stopped or is about to stop.
And so the question is what is the point of contact, really, with this person? The point of contact is when they stop. So, if it's when they stop, it's the parking lot that has to be made much more attractive, not for parking, but... what has to be pleasant is the space for pedestrians. Every one of us, before being a driver, is a pedestrian. But that nature is a bit like a core inside an apple. You have to go digging to find that core. So my idea here is to try to bring out the pedestrian in each of us when we walk, and then we have to find a way so that when you're standing still and about to let go of the wheel, that first step is five stars. It has to be a phenomenal experience.
Shopping centers know how to do this very well (but I would even say that they don't do it as well as they could...). There has also been some progress in the indoor parking lots, which were buried. They put on music, have artistic interventions... It's all very interesting and goes in the right direction. But you can see that street parking, public parking itself, is still poor in terms of the experience for the person. They're often really ugly, unpleasant places, with little light... even during the day.
“I think that when motorists enter a relational space like that, they'll want to slow down and see what's going on around them.”
And that experience is what I think should be better, because it's the first point of contact with the city when you get out of the car. So, the idea is to give people more opportunities to realize that, once you're out of the car, you're better off than you were in it. Today, you can't say that. Today, in general, the first step out of the car is to feel that it's hot or cold, to see that there's nowhere to sit or eat. You're not in the city yet. And that gap it doesn't give me, as a motorist, the chance to get into the city straight away, because it convinces me that it's better to get back in the car. I think that's something we need to change very seriously.
I'm very much in favor of us working much harder to qualify these people parkings, The aim was also to be able to convert them into a real public space at a later date. Maybe today we have 50 parking spaces and tomorrow we'll take away 10 to put in, I don't know, picnic tables and greenery. It'll be a nicer place to hang out, maybe to change the baby's diapers or to rest your shopping there. In general, people always need things like that before they get in the car. We're taking away 10 parking spaces, but this parking lot will become more attractive and interesting. Then, in two or three years' time, we'll take away another 10 spaces to do something else. What is certain is that it was often not very difficult to transform spaces without completely changing the circulatory nature of the place. You don't have to remove all the parking...
“We have to find a way so that when the person is standing still and about to let go of the wheel, that first step is five stars. It has to be a phenomenal experience. Shopping centers know how to do that very well.”
This always involves negotiation between many parties, doesn't it?
In fact, we can't sell anything to anyone. People sell things to themselves. If you want to sell someone a t-shirt, they have to sell themselves that it's really the t-shirt they need. I think the question here is a bit about how we give this space so that, in the governance of the discussion, the person we're negotiating with will find the arguments that end up being arguments in favor of what we're trying to do.
It's always easier to share a future than to share the present. When you make a promise for the future, people always agree. When it's a promise for tomorrow, no one agrees anymore - it's too close, we have too much attention. So there is something there that has to do with the horizon of desire, it has to be a shared horizon. And there's also a way of talking which is more like not hitting obstacles, not trying to raise the obstacle, but more like trying to find a line of desire that is attractive to both parties who are negotiating or to all parties who are negotiating.
I personally work a lot with this, I work much more with desires than with brakes or obstacles, because I believe that we spend a lot of time talking about problems. There are problems, everyone has them and there are many. I think it's important for us to listen a lot to the issue of problems, but also to talk in a way that I don't know supports the problems, but rather supports what we can do together, what we want, what we can share as a desirable horizon.
Cities don't welcome free time. Even transportation is too geared towards boring things like going to work and school, as you said. When I said that, one of the things that immediately came to mind was that in many towns and villages, public transport doesn't work at weekends. And even in a metropolitan area like Lisbon, there are connections that we can't make at certain times and days...
Yes, the whole public transport policy is based on work, rush hour and commuting. The other day I was talking to a colleague just outside Almada who was talking about the issue of better connecting Costa da Caparica with the many Lisboners who go there in the summers. When I was a kid, I used to go there myself, and I remember very well that it was a disaster to get there - even by car, not to mention trying to get there by bus, bicycle or any other way.
Just this weekend I was in the Lapa neighborhood and we wanted to take the streetcar - I wanted to show my boyfriend the streetcar and I realized that there's no streetcar on weekends. But that's the weekend you have time to go with the whole family by streetcar, I don't know, for a drink in Alfama. It's precisely when you have more time and could possibly ditch the car, because you're not so late for work or not in such a hurry to do everything you have to do during the working day, that you're more inclined to try something different. Maybe the streetcar, maybe the bicycle, maybe walking, maybe a mix.
And also at night. The city of the night: having an effective night-time policy, because at night we see people turning to cars, and not just turning to cars, but also turning to higher speeds. This has been proven, many studies show that in places where you've made a zone 30, you've made a zone 20, at night, people easily pass 10 to 15 kilometers faster than they should. So there's something about the way we're investing at night that's not right; you can see that we're not doing what's necessary for the city to be relational at night, for people to have... Things can't be open 24 hours, that's not what I'm saying. But we could have an attitude, with places that are more active at night, that have a bit more life at night. I think that's also what we need to find.
In any case, in the years to come, I think we're also going to have a lot of climate comfort issues, where we're going to need to have a much more, how do you say, welcoming attitude at night, especially for elderly people and families with young children, because they simply won't be able to sleep at night. And we know that sleep is a very important issue. If you can't sleep for several nights in a row, your health is at risk, you get stressed. It's going to be necessary, let's say, to have a way of creating public space that is compatible with night-time uses by people who today don't go out at night, like the elderly, but who go out because it's a bit cooler at night. If we have this attitude of creating proximity nature, of vegetating more and better those places that would be those relational crossroads or those streets/rivers of freshness, then making those fresh places available 300 or 500 meters away, so five minutes from home or something like that.
For me, the ideal would be to have relational and fresh spaces every five minutes. In the same way that we create public transport stops every five minutes, in the same way that we have parking spaces every five minutes...
What I see is that the circulatory function is distributed 100% throughout the city. The relational function, the civic function, the meeting function, the intergenerational function, the social cohesion functions, these are in short supply. And so what we have to change here is distribution. That's the main thing for me - how are we really going to distribute the square meters of relational space in a much more equitable way, in a much more banal way, I have to say, in a logic of fair and much more equitable access, but also in a logic of real proximity. Today, relational functions are still very concentrated in city centers, in parks and main squares, and that's where it ends, and that has to change.
